Human-caused climate change from increasing greenhouse gasses is expected to influence many weather phenomena including extreme events. However, there is not yet a detectable long-term change in many of these extreme events, as is recently emphasized by Roger Pielke Jr. in The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change.

Patrick, The question it seems to me is how one can get any useful information about future rainfall patterns given the terrible model skill for regional rainfall changes. Perhaps one could say generally that rainfall will increase as there is more water vapor in the atmosphere but that seems tenuous to me. One could equally say that with decreasing pole to equator temperature gradients, the driver for temperate zone severe weather will moderate. There is some evidence that tornados in the US are decreasing in number and severity. Yet there seems to be a strong selection bias in what media and scientists talk about in this regard. Why is that?